Ah, the daily grind! One of the things we hope to do here is relieve you of some of the grind in your daily life, by bringing you the finest in casual gameplay the Web has to offer.

Today I actually bring a little extra grind with your relief in the form of Tau'ri Bedrock by Luca Deltodesco, an unusual and original platformer that is a bit reminscent of Loco Roco for the PSP, in some respects. In Bedrock you play a... slime? blob? that has been tasked to roll a boulder through levels upon levels of verdant terrain in order to return it to its parent rock. The arrow keys move your blob, which has the handy ability to squeeze to fit into the narrowest of passages and float on water.

Your boulder alas cannot fit through narrow passages nor does it float, and that's where the puzzle-solving of this platformer comes in. Without letting your boulder get too far ahead of or behind you, you must direct it onto elevators, toss it down steep ravines, and push it ever-so-slowly out of shallow pools in order to reach the end of each stage, where you are then presented with a factoid on the creation of the game itself and a password to return to the same level the next time you play. Was that a run-on sentence?

Analysis: Tau'ri Bedrock is an excellent game that is probably too easy, but I prefer too easy over too hard in a game like this. Push your little rock around each level and enjoy the delightful music accompaniment that doesn't ever quite get annoying, though the grinding sound of the rock as it rolls does just a little bit. There are very nice touches in the graphics, such as a grove of trees (a grove being, you know, like three) having varying levels of depth, so that you pass in front of some and behind others. It's especially fun when you're offered several downhill runs in a row and can just toss the rock down the slope and race after it as fast as you can, pretty much letting gravity take over.

A quick hint on movement: it may be my imagination, but it seemed that using the arrows in combination with one another makes you move slightly faster on the diagonal slopes. So when moving to the right and up at a slight angle, push the [right] and [up] keys together. It wasn't intuitive to me at first since you're rolling along the ground and it seems like it shouldn't matter, but it does. Don't get caught just holding the left and right arrow keys all day long, use them all. This isn't Super Mario Bros.

43 Comments

I played this game earlier and loved it. I also noticed holding up and left/right helped go up slopes. The one thing I didnt like was knocking the rock back out of the water, that was difficult and got tedious after a while.

It's a fun game, but there's a difference between difficulty and annoyingness. There were parts where I would be trying to get the rock over a ridge, and just couldn't take it anymore. And the music is a bit aggravating. Thank god for the mute button.
Yet, it is still entertaining.

Hmm... Now I'm stuck. In the section with the ramp that goes down when you stand on it, I managed to get stuck between the ramp and the end of the slope.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, there's a screenshot of the location in the post.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with the other previous two commenters here - nice enough concept, but the game fails as both a puzzler and a platformer.

As a puzzle game, there's not a single point at which it's less than blatantly obvious what you're supposed to do, which is almost invariably either "Push the rock over the little lip which you can't jump, while you take the thin tunnel" or "Push the rock into the water and let it sink while you take the thin tunnel." There's absolutely no thinking involved.

As a platformer, pretty much the only challenges presented are of the form "hey, let's see if you can stay on top of / under this amorphous rock as it makes random erratic movements to try to shake you off!" - trying to keep a sluggish round blob on top of a smooth cicular rock as it changes direction arbitrarily is an excercise is frustration.

If you hold the down arrow, you sink slightly in water, which helps when pushing the rock.

The game takes a long time before it feels like it becomes a game. "Logic" is the first level with a real timing challenge. Then "Juice" and "Night" have a couple "stay on a moving platform" challenges.

It's kind of annoying to wait for the moving platforms. Motion in the game feels very slow, which makes try-fail-repeat cycles more annoying than they usually are.

There seem to be interesting possibilities in the framework, but what I've played through so far hasn't held my interest. There doesn't seem to be a lot to do in the levels up to "Night", other than learning how to control the springy motion.

of all of the 'difficult/frustrating' games that turn up at jayis, while i did get stuck on a couple of levels neither the music nor the level of difficulty/frustration really stopped me from playing- i think it's great.

I'm with you, cami. \o/
I thought this game was unique and delightful.

Was beginning to wonder with all the negative comments posted, but then again, the JIG community is one tough nut to crack. ;)

And about the IRC server issue mentioned earlier, we're now located on xelium.net, so if you continue to use irc.jayisgames.com as the server you point your client to, you'll find our new home automatically.

It's all your fault, jay, for spoiling us with such stellar games day after day. I didn't think it was too difficult, per se, just not interesting/engaging/rewarding enough to be worth the effort... the seventh or eighth time I fell off one of those moving rocks I just couldn't be bothered to try it again.

Good game overall. The 'try to stay on the platform' parts were frustrating. On the very last level (with the large platform that goes riiiight then leeeeft) you can fall off the left edge of the map. And that's a curious ending to the game...

'The mother apologizes for not being here, but she is busy pounding her son'. Uhm?

To echo Valarauka, the game really didn't grab me either. It's not that it is incredibly frustrating--I've played games that were far more frustrating--it's just that the game itself does not pull me in enough for me to stick through the minor frustration. In other words, the reward I get for pushing on is not enough to justify the effort.

I liked the look and feel of the game, and I even liked the music. It just got old fairly quickly.

Hey, did anybody ever play a game called Gish? It's a flash game that you have to buy to play the full version, but it features a robust demo. The blob premise and the controls are pretty much the same in both this game and Gish.

Unlike this game, the blob can actually stick to things, allowing you to grab and toss objects, plus crawl along the walls and ceilings.

Argh! Just before I entered the next level (I was on rhythm), I had to shove the rock down a hole. The rock fell faster than I did and landed on me. Something went wrong with the physics, because the rock sort of stuck into me and then got catapulted out, while I fell into the next level--sans rock. So I had to restart the whole [email protected]#[email protected]#$ level!

I too liked the game (obviously) but I can see when you're comparing it to similar games that accomplish the concept more completely, this may feel a bit like someone has sucked the cream right out of your Twinkie.

i enjoyed the game albeit the frustration was a little to much for me sometimes.. i wanted some powerups,...

so... just for fun, i found a way to escape juice: during the moving air platforms part, use the water elevator on the right, and if you time it correctly, you can go out of the right side (hold up the entire time).. once you fall off the cliff, your screen stays blue, and if you hold the up key, your ball will oscillate between large and small and some weird shapes :P

Wow, some of you people do not think about what you type on your keyboard. This is a first attempt by an amateur programmer looking for constructive criticism... and you're flaming the game for not being as good as a professional PSP game?

This is a very well-done physics engine. I would love to see it fleshed out with a bigger variety of gameplay and graphics. Also, please don't make the passwords case sensitive.

I'm with jay and dancemonkey. I loved the game, music was entertaining, sound effects good, and the physics worked extremely well. The only criticism i have is i would like to see more challenge to it. The "stay on the moving rock" parts did get slightly repetitive, and seemed like the only truly difficult part. Maybe make some more challenging sections to it.
Overall, entertaining game. 7.5/10

I found it a nice proof of concept. However, the review did not make that clear, so I expected something more polished than was actually the case.

A lot of it is rather slow, and the first few levels are all the same. I actually stopped playing out of tedium and boredem.

Also the plot didn't make sense. From the story at the start, I expected to have to shift the rock upwards, back towards its mother. Instead we plunge further and further downwards. I wondered how many miles down we were. Then I wondered why trees and grass were growing so deep down.

Constructive suggestions:

- more variety in graphics and locations.
- identify slow locations, keep the same difficulty, but speed up blob / rock movement a bit.
- rejig the story so the mother is a ball of lava at the centre of the earth, and the son has wandered into a volcano pipe by mistake and been ejected to the surface. You have to go up onto the surface then herd the rock down through a series of forests, caves, sewage pipes, lost buried cities, mushroom caves, dinosaur caves, magma tubes, hollow seas, atlantis, all the way down to the centre of the earth.
- an indicator of your depth would give an idea of progress.

On the one level where there's a large flat elevator that you must both ride at the beginning, I went left over the hump instead of right (which was apparently the right way) as I fell into infinity and the "blob" started spazzing out...it was pretty cool, actually.

I thought this was quite a good game, i thought the music was catchy and i kept going for quite a few levels, but i must agree it got samey - you need to introduce more elements into the game to keep people's attention. Ohterwise i thought a good game. Well done!

i thought it was a cool game. the blob thing reminded me of the thing in the dofi-blog sand games. i thought it was cool when the blob "swallowed" the rock a few times. one time it even kept me from dropping the rock over a cliff. i found the rock always came out once i went fast enough.

i think if the levels were shorter it would be less frustrating to have to start over. wit a bit more variation, (i like Tomato's ideas) i think this could be an awesome game. a lava element that could carry the rock, but the blob couldn't touch would be a cool addition. i didn't think the music was annoying either.

Tomato, I think your idea for incorporating different worlds is really cool! That's the kind of thing that separates ordinary games from really interesting ones. It's hard to say what makes that different from other, lamer ideas though...

Also, to increase the puzzle factor, the field of view of the game should be increased so that you can see more of the level at once. That would allow the incorporation of more complex interactions with the environment. Items, switches, keys, path splitting, etc, wouldn't hurt either. I would say it should go in the direction of a platformer rather than a puzzler. I did like the physics even though it was a little slow-moving. Good job for a first try! (I wouldn't give it more than 5/10 though.) Hope this guy keeps working if he enjoyed making this one.

Yes, Darren, I also got the rock stuck inside the blob! It was... amusing. I did manage to squeeze the rock out of me by being squished against the underside of a larger rock, shown in my screenshot, but when my rock popped out of me, it killed me, and I was taken back to the start of the level.

Oh my, it happened again, and on the same level, too. The rock popped into me when it fell from a ledge and landed on me. It popped out of me and went flying through the air, however, when I dropped off of a ledge.

I ate the rock using the blob again.... And there is no way to ever get it out.... So, I make the suggestion of an explode button, where you explode all over and then reform next to the rock in a anime animation or something. (you know with the background going all fast and minimal movement)

Actually there is a way to get the rock out of your blob, just keep moving around till' it comes out!I loved the game and the only part I hated was when I kept falling off the elavators things and had to restart the level.:-)

I finally beat it its not that i'm not good it's that at this one part the stone always got lodged inside of the blob but i've go to say the ending was a little disappointing you dont even see the rock mother :(

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